Photo shot by Lelia Navidi, Courtesy of the Star Tribune.
by Matt Hoffman
“The club that nobody wanted, the club that nobody wanted, the club that nobody wanttteed … is coming to MLS!” –Dark Clouds Supporters, March 2015
“We really want to have a team in Minnesota …but they have to play in a downtown stadium because that’s the deal we cut.” –MLS Commissioner Don Garber, last month
LA Galaxy coach Bruce Arena earned the ire of the MLS Commissioner last year saying, “Because they [meaning MLS] are children and there have to be adults in the process.”
Arena’s remarks earned him a stiff fine but they caricatured a league whose rules and processes were needlessly complicated and were more in the interest of protecting its owners than satisfying its fan base.
Fast forward to the situation in Minnesota and it looks like another example of “MLS going to MLS.”
Just months after Garber gushed: “[Minnesota United] represent exactly what we want and what we need to continue this momentum that we have, that’s really stimulating the growth of our league,” MLS has implied that it is ready to pull the plug on Minnesota Uniteds promotion to Major League Soccer.
How did the expansion go from, to quote Soundgarden, “Looking California, but feeling Minnesota?”
A July 1 deadline was imposed. Or was it? United ownership seemed to think it was a suggestion but with MLS it was all too real . It wasn’t looking good though. When asked all Garber would say:
“I’m not going to comment on it until that deadline has passed. I have a lot of respect for Bill McGuire and his partners. We love the market. We want to see something happen there. But we’ll wait and see. We really want to have a team in Minnesota, but they have to play in a downtown stadium because that’s the deal we cut.”
With the deadline passing, MLS VP Mark Abbott took to the airwaves on ESPN Radio’s Minneapolis affiliate to publicly cast doubts that Minnesota will be even coming to MLS at all:
The potential site for the downtown stadium that is at the heart of Minnesota United’s MLS bid.
“We did decide that it would be appropriate for me to come to Minnesota [to]learn more about the opportunity in St. Paul,” Abbott said on 1500-AM ESPN, ”so that we can make a fully informed decision as to whether we should continue to consider Minnesota as a potential expansion market.”
The club’s ownership group went to the State Capitol in April to ask Governor Mark Dayton to sidestep property and sales taxes on the proposed $180 million stadium that would be in the neighborhood of the Target Center and Target Field, teams whose owners (Glen Taylor (Timberwolves) and Carl Pohlad (Twins)) are part of McGuire’s ownership group.
The legislature voted otherwise, 61 to 4 against using any monies (including tax breaks) to “fund the construction of a new major league soccer stadium.”
Owner Bill McGuire was left to bemoan that forging ahead would be “very difficult.”
That’s not to say he is necessarily out of options if Minnesota United are going to be a MLS team:
Option 1: Find a new site
From recent reports, that is what is happening now with team and league officials examining St. Paul where the Minnesota Wild NHL team plays.
What a Loon! Minnesota United’s mascot.
Option 2: Staying in Blaine
MN United do have a stadium. It’s just that it seats a scant 5,000 (less than half of the current smallest stadium in MLS) and it’s in Blaine, a half hour outside of the downtown Minneapolis gem promised to league officials.
I didn’t say it was a good option, but perhaps with some modifications it can be a stop-gap.
Option 3: Paying the piper
This seems like far-and-away the best option if Minnesota really wants to be in MLS. Like the next guy, I’m looking to cut costs where I can. But it’s hard to garner sympathy from a bunch of multi-millionaires particularly when, Garber feels he is being shorted the downtown stadium that was central to the entire transaction.
Option 4: Crashing at your friend’s house
What about an hybrid of the two? The Twins are part of the ownership group, it’s not an ideal solution but perhaps as a stop-gap. After all, NYCFC is playing in Yankee Stadium and it would appear the team (currently playing in MLS) is no closer to a stadium deal than Minnesota is?
The question was posited to Garber which he shot down immediately:
“No, that wasn’t the agreement we made with them .. We’re going to make different decisions in different markets … That’s one thing being the boss allows us to do.”
Option 5: Sleeping with enemy
Minnesota United wasn’t the only team openly courting a MLS team in Minnesota. The Minnesota Vikings touted that their new stadium could be converted to an MLS stadium and it appeared the group had an exclusive deal with MLS.
Should the two warring factions be able to put their differences aside, it wouldn’t be the first time a team franchise paired together a pair of strange bedfellows.
The question might be: If Minnesota United is not taking the field for the next couple of season, why is MLS so brazenly rolling the dice of its political capital? Despite the league and sports gaudy numbers, the league wouldn’t seem to be in the position to yank a franchise away just months after awarding it.
However, something about this setback sent red flags to MLS leadership. These red flags are not necessarily coming from Minnesota United but rather, Chivas USA.
In case you’ve forgotten, Chivas USA was a nightmare for the league. There’s a number of things that went wrong here but this is a team got caught using undocumented workers and faced a racism lawsuit, both huge embarrassments for the league. The fans stayed away as the the team “broke” the record for the all time lowest attendance.
Then you have the owner, Jorge Vergara who only visited Carson, where the team played, twice. At one of those trips, Vergara allegedly began a staff meeting in Spanish then said in English: ““If you didn’t understand what I just said, then it is time for you to get a job down the hall [where the Los Angeles Galaxy plays].”
The Chivas USA experience is something the league, especially given its structure, never wants to go through again.
Remember, Major League Soccer is not run like other professional sport leagues in the United States. Despite loosening the restrictions on teams over the years, MLS remains a single-entity in which the league owns all of teams. When a team joins MLS, its “owner” isn’t an owner in the traditional sense but an actual “investor-operator”.
It all comes back to Chivas USA
Relocating or shuttering a team is easy in other leagues. Teams share revenue but aren’t particularly affected by events, such as teams declaring bankruptcies as teams in MLB and NHL have done.
If someone buys into MLS, they are a partner and thus cannot be removed without a discernible abundance of effort.
In the end, the investor-operators took the poison pill, buying Vergara out for far more than the team was worth only to immediately dissolve it. For the upwards of $60 million that was reportedly paid to Vergara you could throw more than thirty ticket-tape USWNT parades or fund the NWSL for several years.
Having experienced that toxicity, it’s understandable why the league would take off the gloves with Minnesota. To fans and pundits alike it may seem unfair and perhaps even mean-spirited. But the league would counter that they are doing what adults often do:
Being responsible.
